Tenfold errorPage in faked ‘baby home’ birth certs estimate
Scale of false documents far higher
TEN times more people have false or illegal birth certificates – resulting from stays at mother and baby homes – than the Government originally estimated, a victims’ group will tell and Oireachtas Committee today.
Documents that have been lodged with the Joint Oireachtas Children’s Committee say that 1,544 people, rather than the 151 estimated by the Government, have ‘false birth registrations’.
The scandal of the false and illegal birth certificate registrations came to light after an RTÉ investigation into mother and baby homes such as St Patrick’s Guild.
In May 2018 the then children’s minister Katherine Zappone revealed that 126 illegal or false birth certificates had been issued to people who had been given up for adoption at mother and baby homes. Current Children’s Minister Roderic O’Gorman will soon bring a Bill which will seek to rectify the false birth records.
Mr O’Gorman is putting together a compensation scheme for victims, which the Irish Mail on Sunday recently revealed is expected to cost the State over €1.5billion.
The ‘Who Am I?’ group – representing victims and their families – will tell today’s Oireachtas Committee hearing the original false registration of births has affected the validity of subsequent generations.
The group will also say that the numbers who received or inherited false or incorrect birth certs could be much higher, as the children and grandchildren of those illegal adoptees also have the wrong Government records.
‘If we extrapolate that to include the following generations then the numbers become 178,035 – a number larger than mother and baby homes [56,000], Magdalene laundries [10,000] and adoptions from 1953-2019 [44,763] added together,’ it states.
The Irish Daily Mail understands that the attendees will tell the committee that they are ‘representatives of a group, called “relevant persons” in the proposed Bill, and share one thing, each of our birth certificates contain false information making them illegal, not just “incorrect”’. They will add: ‘We are not, as claimed by some groups, illegal adoptees but the victims of kidnap, childtrafficking and identity theft.’
According to documents, the group’s opening statement will say: ‘The number of acknowledged cases of false birth registrations is 151 but this doesn’t take into account other groups.
‘Based on our estimates, that number is actually 1,544 false birth records known to date.’
An RTÉ Investigates documentary last March showed how religious orders pursued birth mothers for maintenance payments months after their children were adopted.
It also revealed more evidence of how Professor Éamon de Valera, a son of the former president, faked medical documents to facilitate illegal adoptions. In January, the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes published its longawaited report.
However, it was largely silent on illegal adoptions despite Government promises for action in 2018 after it was revealed that 126 adoptees had been illegally registered on their birth certificates as the natural children of their adoptive parents.
Groups such as the Adoption Rights Alliance and the Mother and Baby Home Collaborative
‘We are victims of kidnap’
Formed to shine light on fiasco
Forum were formed to shine a light on the fiasco. The forum was set up in 2018 by Ms Zappone to help inform the Department of Children of survivors’ wishes on legacy issues related to the homes as the commission carried out its work.
The extent of the scandal only began to emerge when the former St Patrick’s Guild Catholic adoption society run by the Religious Sisters of Charity transferred its files to Tusla and it was decided those who had illegally adopted would be informed.